Jared (6 page)

God, he was still stuck on that. She slapped her hands
on her hips. That was really too much. “Who on earth appointed you my
guardian?”

He didn’t even take a breath between her question and
his answer. “The Renegade Council.”

“You’re Renegade?” She took a step back. A quick
glance over her shoulder showed a clear shot to the cliff.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m not, which means your council has no say
over me.”

“Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks to being female
is you’re either Sanctuary or Renegade with no point in between.”

“I don’t agree with your philosophy.”

Another discreet glance and another step. Not all
vampires could fly. As big as he was, it went against logic that Jared could.
That skill seemed to be relegated to the smaller-boned, lighter vamps. She
couldn’t fly, either, but she might be able to trick him over the edge.

“Your agreement isn’t necessary,” he told her, his
energy pulling into tight focus.

“So you say.” It was now or never. The winter-burned
bush on the edge looked like it could hold her weight. She gathered her
strength and shifted her grip up to her backpack.

Jared waved a hand toward the cliff. “You’ll never
make it. I’ll have you in two steps.”

A little primitive shiver of awareness went through
her at his use of the word “have.” There was something so elemental in the way
he said it, a hint of possessiveness that wasn’t hitting her sense of
independence with the note of discord it should. Good grief, had the Sanctuary
messed her up more than she was aware? Had the mental manipulations taken a
deeper hold than she’d thought?

“What’s wrong?” He took a step toward her, reaching
out, a frown on his face. With a blink she realized she’d projected her
distress straight into the waiting arms of his energy.

She pulled the wayward emotions back. “I don’t like
your attitude.”

His chin angled down, the shadow from his hat hiding
the color of his eyes, only leaving the flickers of energy at the edges of his
irises dancing like flames in the darkness. “That panic went a whole lot deeper
than annoyance.”

“Maybe you should try looking at the situation through
my eyes. A self-proclaimed bad-ass vampire kidnaps me—”

“Rescues you,” he corrected, the flames in his eyes
becoming more noticeable.

As if she cared if he got annoyed at this point. Men
with as much arrogance as Jared carried around deserved to have it tweaked now
and then. “As I was saying, I get kidnapped, locked in a tiny airless cell—”

“It wasn’t airless.”

She waved away his interruption. “The reality is, I
have trouble with small spaces.”

“I didn’t notice any trouble last night.”

She breathed out a sigh and wrapped her fingers back
around the strap. “You really can’t help arguing, can you?”

“Not when you lie to paint a more favorable picture of
yourself.”

It wasn’t a lie. Normally she panicked when closed in,
but last night she hadn’t. She didn’t know the why of that any more than she
knew how she was going to save Miri, but she’d figure it out. She always
figured something out. She sighed and hitched up her slipping backpack. “Where
have you been all your life? Manipulating reality is what people do when
they’re telling a story.”

“You can stick with the truth while telling this one.”

Wind gusted over the ridge, blowing her hair around
her face and a shiver down her spine. Damn, she hated the cold. “What’s the
point?”

He took one step, closing the distance it’d taken her
three to create. “The joy in telling a story is in the magic of spinning the
tale, not in the number of exaggerations you can create.”

She watched warily as he reached over her shoulder.
“So you say.” Her backpack flipped open. “And who’s to say I was exaggerating?”
she asked, twisting her neck to see what he was doing. The blanket slid from
the pack. He dropped it around her shoulders, encompassing pack and all as he
drew it around her.

“I do.”

“That’s because you’re six-foot-plus and more brawn
than—” She reconsidered finishing that statement.

“More brawn than what?”

“Than a five-foot-tall woman of undisclosed weight.”

The twitch of his lips was definitely amusement. “Now
there’s another difference in how I’d tell the story.” He pressed the edges of
the blanket into her hands. “I’d use the word insufficient to describe your
weight.”

She grabbed the edges tightly, steadying herself in
the aftermath of the riot of her senses at his nearness. “No one asked for your
version.”

The edges of his lips quirked up, this time reaching a
smile. And again she blinked. That hint of softness took his expression from
hard-edged nasty to downright sensual with just that tiny shift of muscle.

“Just your lucky night that I’m offering it for free.”

Right. Her lucky night. So far she’d had to pick her
way out of an illusion trap, dodge a patrolling band of Sanctuary vampires, and
now she had to sweet-talk her way out of the clutches of a
too-handsome-for-his-own-good Renegade do-gooder. Yup, luck was what she had.
Bad luck. “I’m a very lucky woman.”

Jared’s head tilted to the side as he took a step
back. “Now why do I feel my suspicions acting up when you start agreeing with
me?”

“Probably because you weren’t toilet trained properly
as a baby.”

The little smile spread to a grin. Again she blinked.
A grinning Jared was positively lethal. “What makes you so sure of that?”

She hugged the blanket to her as the rattle of treetops
heralded the next wind. “Your uptight and controlling nature.”

His eyes narrowed as the wind gusted around them.
Though she tried to hide it, she knew he hadn’t missed her shiver.

“Well, since my uptight and controlling nature and I
are going to be your bosom buddies for the next couple weeks, you’d better get
used to it.”

“A couple weeks? I can’t stay with you for a couple
weeks! I have a life to live.”

His hand came under her chin, lifting her face to a
fast-fading strip of moonlight. “No one’s stopping your living, just who you’re
living with.” He tilted her head to the right, his muscles easily overwhelming
her stubbornness.

“You have no right—”

“We’ve already gone over my rights.”

She jerked her chin. “While trampling mine.”

“Tough times call for tough adjustments.” His thumb
pressed her lip and withdrew. He watched the spot for a heartbeat, then pinned
her gaze with his. “You’re anemic.”

“So?”

He frowned. “You knew?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it’s not unusual.”

His frown deepened. “Why?”

She rolled her eyes and jerked her chin off the shelf
of his fingers. “If I knew that, I could fix it, couldn’t I?”

He caught her chin again. “You need to feed.”

“No, I don’t.” She’d just gotten over the vomiting and
pain of the last feeding. She wasn’t going through it again until she
absolutely had to.

“You’re weak.”

“Only compared to you.”

“You’ll slow me down.”

She had an easy solution to that. “Leave me behind.”

His grip on her chin tightened to near pain. “As
Sanctuary bait? I don’t think so.”

“How do you know I’m not one of them?”

That made him pause. He appeared to debate the issue
for two seconds and then shrugged. “I don’t, but whether you are or not is
immaterial. You’re going with me.” He dropped his hand to her shoulder,
frustrating her plan to bolt. “However, it does bring up the question of what
you’re doing out here in the middle of nowhere, alone.”

“Well, I didn’t start in the middle of nowhere. I had
help getting here.”

“By the men I saw you with.”

“Yes. They had some sort of take-me-to-their-leader
fetish.” She cast him a look. “Not unlike yourself.”

He smiled and then, when she shivered, he pulled her
against him. Her cheek settled naturally against his chest. God, he was big.
And warm. As she stood in his arms, fighting to keep from snuggling in, he
seemed to get warmer. In another minute she realized he was. He was regulating
his body heat. Elevating it for her. He put her hands under his shirt. His
abdomen sucked in on a quick gasp.

“I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for. I’d just forgotten how cold
a woman’s hands can get.”

When she tried to withdraw them, he shook his head.
“Stay put until you warm up.”

It was the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for her
in over two hundred years. She tried to think of the moment as a purely
clinical one, tried to think of his stomach as an impersonal fire-place, but
the longer she stood there in the cold night air, the more aware of him she
became. The ridges of muscle beneath her hands, the raw masculinity he exuded
with every breath, his heat, the draw of his power. Jared of the Renegades, she
decided, was a very dangerous man. She withdrew her hands from his skin.

“All warm?”

He wasn’t even breathing heavy. Apparently, she didn’t
have the same effect on his senses that he had on hers. “Yes, thank you.”

He grabbed his gun. “Then let’s go.”

“Go where?”

He pointed northwest with the rifle. “Up that slope.”

Slope? It was a mountain! “What’s up there?”

“Food.”

She looked at the slope and then back at him. “There’s
no need to climb the mountain on my account.”

He caught her arm and turned her in the direction he
wanted her to go. “There’s every need.”

“It’s not going to make a difference.”

“That I’ll have to see for myself.”

She dug in her heels. “I don’t see why we have to go
up so you can make a point.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Because that’s the
way I’m going.”

It was the opposite way she was supposed to be
heading. “I can’t go with you.”

He didn’t look back, just kept on walking. “I wasn’t
aware that I was giving you a choice.”

She braced her foot on a log, grabbing his wrist with
her free hand for added strength. “You have to.”

He popped her over without even so much as a tug on
her arm. “Why? Do you have a man to get back to?”

The push of his power was suddenly stronger, coming at
her from multiple angles, testing for the truth.

“Yes.”

The growl surrounded her, spinning her around. She
couldn’t see anything. She stepped closer to Jared, searching the forest. Then
she looked up. Jared’s eyes were red, brilliant with heat and energy. And
anger. Oh hell. She took a cautious step back, watching him carefully. She
might have just jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

DINNER was served.

Raisa took a breath. As dinners go, it wasn’t bad.
Young, healthy, physically fit, the woman would have sustained a normal vampire
for a good month. But Raisa couldn’t bring herself to even take the step that
would bring her close enough to do a test nibble on the young hiker.

She motioned to the man—obviously the woman’s
boyfriend—Jared also held in thrall, “Why can’t I have him?”

That her choice of wording wasn’t the best was evident
from the deep rumble that emanated from Jared’s chest. Jared had been doing a
lot of growling since she’d announced she had a man waiting for her. Raisa
wasn’t even sure he was aware of making the noise, but every time she said
something that stroked his growing sense of possessiveness, he growled. She
pushed her hair out of her face. “I’ll take that as a ‘no.’ ”

“The woman’s blood is good.”

And that was just the problem. The woman’s blood was
good. So was the woman. Raisa had scanned her mind the minute Jared had brought
her to them. She never fed from good people. It struck her as morally wrong.
Like taking advantage of the innocent. “Can’t we look for someone else?”

“You need blood now.”

“Actually, I’m fine for a few more weeks.”

“No, you’re not.”

As he wasn’t going to hear anything else on the
matter, she wasn’t going to argue with him. She waved to the couple, trying
another tactic. “If we feed from them, this will completely ruin their
honeymoon.”

“They have a lifetime to make up for it.”

“But a woman only has one honeymoon.” She looked at
the young couple. Both had brown hair, fine skin, and that healthy glow that
came from an active lifestyle. They had no money but a lot of love. Both were
going to school, working two jobs to make ends meet, and in the midst of the
stress of their lives, they had married, a smile on their lips, hope in their
heart. This weekend in the mountains was all they could afford, and they didn’t
care. To them the time together was a precious gift they cherished. God, to be
in love like that. She tilted her head and smiled at the magic of it. “She sold
her iPod to buy him those gloves.”